Louis Werner

Louis Werner is a writer and filmmaker living in New York City.

Articles by Louis Werner

Written by Ingrid Bejarano Escanilla and Louis Werner
Art by Belén Esturla

Over his 90-year lifetime, this chronicler of fact and unabashed fancy trekked, sailed, caravanned, studied and traded from the far Arab West to the northern- and easternmost reaches of the 12th-century Islamic world.

Paved with stones that, according to one Roman writer, “give the appearance not simply of being laid together ... but they seem to have actually grown together,” the Via Egnatia joined East and West under empires both Roman and Ottoman. Much of its 1,100-kilometer length can still be walked and driven, from original-stone footpaths in Albania to a superhighway in Greece.

Socially acerbic, survivor of 11th-century politics that drove him from three homes, Ibn Hazm wrote prolifically on many subjects, but he is remembered most of all for his bittersweet classic, Tawq al-Hamama, or The Ring of the Dove.

Good looks and a fleet wit gave Al-Ghazal his name, which means “gazelle,” and in later years the poet and courtier of Córdoba proved a reluctant though dutiful envoy both east and, more notably, north.

Minister in the Nasrid court of Granada both before and after exile in Morocco, Ibn al-Khatib was a poet, a polymath and an insomniac whose writings earned him renown and a prominent inscription on a wall at the Alhambra.

Nourished from the north by three rivers from two nations and from the south by the Bay of Bengal, the world’s largest mangrove forest brings together not only rivers and sea, but also hundreds of plant and animal species as well as some 4 million people who live and work in and around the Sundarbans. Protected by both India and Bangladesh, the Sundarbans is listed as a UN World Heritage Site, its name meaning “beautiful forest” in Bengali. As populations and sea levels continue to rise, so too do the challenges.

Our six-part series begins with a two-year pilgrimage by one of the great founders of the literary genre of rihla, or travelogue. Over later centuries, his style was widely emulated (and plagiarized), and today the rihla of Ibn Jubayr uniquely illuminates a 12th-century Mediterranean world of paradoxical complexity.

Written by Maria Jesús Viguera Molins and Louis Werner
Art by Belén Esturla

Over his 90-year lifetime, this chronicler of fact and unabashed fancy trekked, sailed, caravanned, studied and traded from the far Arab West to the northern- and easternmost reaches of the 12th-century Islamic world.

Abandoned for more than 300 years following its eclipse by competing cities, the remnants of a once-flourishing capital of a once-powerful Silk Roads realm remind us of centuries of craftsmanship and scholarship in one of Central Asia’s most intact historical sites.

One of the world's most beloved children's stories, The Little Prince – as it is titled in English – resonates especially in Morocco among Amazigh, or Berber, children and not just for its familiar desert setting. As one translator explains, "The plot has many similarities to our Amazigh oral tales."